Earth
"Fight for her." :— Bulletin board poster of Earth Earth, known to prehistoric Humans and Forerunners as "Erde-Tyrene", is the third planet of the Sol system, and one of four terrestrial worlds. As the Homeworld and capital of Humanity; it's entering a new golden age, with the resource wealth of a dozen settled colonies and a hundred industrial outposts flowing back to Earth, fueling great works of industry, commerce, and art. The great cities are greening as arcology skyscrappers and telecommuting allow more efficent use of land. Earth is still divided among nation-states, though all are affiliated beneath the overarching banner of the UEG. While every human enjoys longer and better life than ever, the gap between rich and poor widens daily due to it being the most populated planet of the human space territories Earth has been at the forefront of galactic history, from encounters with the Precursors to the end of the Covenant Empire. It was Inhabited long ago by a prehistoric interstellar human government that was conquered and dissolved by the Forerunners. For a significant amount of humanity's history, it was to then the only known place in the universe to support life. History Prehistory The Earth first formed about 4.6 billion years ago, and gave rise to the first single-celled organisms about 3.9 billion years ago. About 200,000 years ago, the ancestors of modern humans, Homo Sapiens, evolved in Africa. Indigenous to Eastern Africa, they gradually spread across the entire planet. Eventually, the humans, originally consisting of groups of hunter-gatherers, began to develop into civilizations. Human civilizations gradually became more and more complex, and eventually, possibly through contact with the Forerunners, humanity discovered spaceflight and spread across the Orion Arm of the Milky Way galaxy. After being defeated in a war against the Forerunner civilization, the humans were exiled back to Earth, with their species devolved and splintered into multiple subspecies and their culture degrading back to a primitive state for millennia. After the war with the Forerunners, Earth and humanity came under the charge of the the Librarian, a Forerunner Lifeshaper who helped the humans slowly work towards rebuilding a primitive civilization. Remnants of their former technology, such as steam power and hot-air balloon flight, were re-learned under her care but later forgotten after the firing of the Halo Array. Forerunner-Flood war Near the end of their war with the Flood, the Forerunners built a machine to generate a slipspace portal to the Ark in Africa. They also indexed the human species as a part of their Conservation Measure to preserve life in the galaxy after the activation of the Halo Array. After the array's activation, human life was planted back on Earth, where it successfully re-developed. Civilization and the Modern Age After the recovery from the Array, humans reduced back to hunter-gatherers for nearly a hundred thousand years, until civilizations began to form anew. By the year 1914, much of the world was divided into two factions, the Triple Entente, or Allies: the United Kingdom, France, Russia, and later the United States of America, and the Triple Alliance, or Central Powers: Germany, Austria-Hungary, and other nations of similar ideals. The Central Powers were defeated at the end of World War I in 1918, resulting in a decade of prosperity for the Allies, followed by an economic depression and the rise of Fascism, Nazism, and Communism in many countries. In 1939, another World War erupted, between the Allies (Britain, the Soviet Union, which were, again, later joined by the United States, and many other nations) and the Axis (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the Empire of Japan). In 1945, the Allies defeated the Axis. Later that year, the victorious nations, in an attempt to prevent more World Wars, founded the United Nations, an international assembly of peaceful nations, whose goal was to settle international disputes peacefully, and was the predecessor to the UNSC. In 1957, humanity finally made their way into space with unmanned probes and by 1961, humans themselves had gone into space. In 1969, humanity had finally stepped on an extraterrestrial surface-Earth's Moon. After World War II, humanity would lack war on that scale, although smaller wars and conflicts erupted, including the Korean War, Vietnam War, Cold War, and the first and second Iraq War. In the early 21st century, terrorism became a particular thorn in the side for the nations on Earth and small wars broke out along with civil unrest in many countries. However, no full wars on the same scale as past World Wars erupted until two centuries later. Interplanetary colonization and conflicts By 2080, humanity's national governments, under the auspices of the United Nations, had begun to establish colonies on the other planets in the Sol system. However, expansion did not come without problems. In the mid-22nd century, two major dissident factions emerged; the neo-communist Koslovics and fascist Frieden, which began to battle one another and the United Nations. In March–June 2160, Jovian Frieden secessionists attacked United Nations colonial advisers on the moon Io, which led to three months of fighting between the Earth military and Jovian Frieden forces. National governments began to support their own colonies which sparked proxy wars off-planet, leading to tension and militarization on Earth. In 2162, armed conflict ripped through South America, starting the Rain Forest Wars, as Koslovic, Frieden, and UN forces all clashed over ideological differences, sparking additional conflicts off-planet. In December of 2163, the three factions clashed, this time on Mars. This was the first extraterrestrial use of Marines, who launched lightning raids on Koslovic positions, permanently affecting military doctrine for centuries. In 2164, UN forces began a massive military build-up and began the first true interplanetary war. The forces of the fledgling United Nations Space Command were significantly bolstered by a massive propaganda campaign running on the victories on Mars and over the next six years took back the Sol system and drove the dissident factions to destruction. Now with a massive military with no enemy to fight, overpopulation, famine, and a collapsing economy, the newly unified Earth faced an uncertain future. It was not until 2291 that this problem was solved when researchers created the Shaw-Fujikawa Translight Engine which enabled superluminal travel by allowing access to an alternate domain known as Slipstream space. In 2310, the UNSC unveiled their first line of colony ships and the best and brightest from both civilian walks of life and the military set out to form the Inner colonies. This eased the overpopulation problem upon Earth which became the capital of the Unified Earth Government, while the inner colony of Reach would later became the headquarters of the UNSC. The Insurrection and the Human-Covenant war Humanity would enter a period of peaceful stability for the next two hundred years, until civil unrest began to spread in the Outer Colonies, with various groups seeking secession from Earth and the UEG . The scale of the unrest would steadily rise, eventually becoming a major threat by 2517 to the UEG's existence, and in response the UNSC began the SPARTAN-II Program. All this was suddenly and violently rendered a moot point when a single alien ship made an unprovoked attack on the colony of Harvest, humanity's first encounter with an alien civilization - the Covenant. Over the next twenty-seven years, humanity would wage a brutal war for survival, losing hundreds of colonies, including all of the Outer Colonies in 2536; and on August 31st, 2552, the UNSC's largest military installation, the planet Reach , was destroyed by the Covenant. During the entire course of the conflict, the UNSC followed the Cole Protocol, which declared that no UNSC vessel targeted by the Covenant was to retreat to Earth, as a means of ensuring the secrecy and security of the planet's location. In nearly twenty-seven years of galactic warfare, the Covenant never succeeded in determining the location of Earth through the measures taken under the Cole Protocol. However, by September, 2552, Earth was humanity's last major stronghold in its war against the Covenant. Despite the effectiveness of this law, on October 20th, 2552, the Covenant launched their first attack upon Earth, rendering the Cole Protocol moot and initiating the final confrontation between UNSC forces and the Covenant. Pre-Battle of Earth Prior to the Covenant invasion of Earth, there had been a suppressed influx of information by ONI, resulting in people going about their normal lives even up until the attack. The forces stationed at Earth were heavy, with the Second Fleet, Seventh Fleet, the Sixteenth Fleet and the 6th Battle Group along with large amounts of Marines, Army Troopers, and ODSTs present, five SPARTAN-IIs, Admiral Hood and Earth's most prominent means of defense, three hundred Orbital Defence Platforms, each sporting a Mk. V "Super" MAC. Also, there were numerous human colonies on various moons, a large naval shipyard and factories at Mars, and a listening post at Io. Following the victory at the Battle of Earth and the Battle of Installation 00, the Human-Covenant war ended in March 2553. Many of Earth's cities were left in ruins and the planet's population was sharply reduced as a result of the Covenant invasion. With the war's end and the departure of the Covenant separatists to their respective homeworlds, the UNSC has begun to rebuild the extensive damage inflicted upon Earth's infrastructure and human population. Post-war Following the end of the Human-Covenant war, Earth saw an influx of refugees from former Covenant species, who were walled off in "conclaves". In 2557, six months after the New Phoenix incident, a Sangheili refugee attempted to detonate a Havok nuclear bomb in Rio de Janeiro, but was apprehended before he could do so.